“A poor enough possession, Sophy, but all that
remains to me,” he said gently. “Is
it a light thing for Nicholas Jelnik to say to the
woman he loves, ‘I cannot marry you: I am
a beggar’? Is it such a small sacrifice
to give you up, Sophy?”

“It would appear so.”

“You crucify me!” he said, in a choking
voice. “Good God, don’t you understand
that I love you?”

“I don’t understand anything, except that
you are going away from me. And I have waited
for you all my life,” I said.

“And I for you! and I for you!” he said
passionately. “Don’t make it too
hard for me, Sophy!”

“If you go away from me,” I gasped, “I
think I shall die. Nicholas—­I can’t
bear it! It was easier for me when I thought you
loved somebody else. But now that I know you love
me” and I paused.

He took a step forward, but stopped. His arms
fell to his sides.

“Not as a beggar!” he said. “Not
as a beggar! Never that, for Nicholas Jelnik!
I love you too much for that, Sophy. I love you
not only for yourself, but for my own best self, too,
my dearest.”

For a moment he stood there, regarding me fixedly.
It was a long look, of suffering, of love, of pride,
of unyielding resolve. Then he lifted my hand
to his lips, bowed, and left me.

I sat staring over the garden. I wondered if,
somewhere on the other side of things, Great-Aunt
Sophronisba wasn’t snickering.

CHAPTER XX

HARBOR

“My faith, but I’m glad you’re entirely
well again, Sophy!” wrote The Author, in his
small, fine, hypercritical script. “You
make the world a pleasanter place by being alive in
it. People like you should inculcate in themselves
the fixed and unalterable habit of being alive.
They should firmly refuse to be anything else.
I call this to your attention, in the hope that you
will see your bounden duty and do it.

“When I thought you were going to quit, I ran
away. That was a calamity I could not stand by
and witness, without disaster. However, Jelnik
stayed!

“Your nurse (I do not like Miss Ransome, though
I respect, admire, and fear her. Her emotions
are carbolized, her heart is sterilized, her personality
has the mathematical perfection of something turned
out by a super-machine: like, say, the last word
in machine-guns. None of the divine imperfection
of your hand-wrought, artist-stuff there! I forgive
her for existing, because she is intelligent and useful,
two things that, without lying like a Christian and
a gentleman, one may not say of many women, and seldom
of one woman at the same time), your nurse gave me